Sawbones - plus, What's So 'Civil' About 'Civil War'?

[Merriam-Webster]( WORD OF THE DAY October 2, 2019 sawbones [Audio pronunciation]( noun | SAW-bohnz Definition slang : [physician]( [surgeon]( Scroll down for more about sawbones TRENDING NOW: [quid pro quo]( [impeach]( [dastardly]( [stymie]( [SEE ALL [>]]( PEOPLE ARE READING [What's So 'Civil' About 'Civil War'?]( [Is it 'Forty'? Or 'Fourty'?]( [A 4-Round Bout with 'Punch']( [The Good, The Bad, & The Semantically Imprecise - 9/27/19]( WORD GAMES AND QUIZZES: WEEKLY CHALLENGE [Advanced Vocabulary Quiz]( Tough words and tougher competition. [PLAY NOW]( Nailed this quiz? We have plenty more to try! [TAKE ME THERE [>]]( Did You Know? Sawbones cut its first literary tooth in Charles Dickens's 1837 novel The Pickwick Papers, when Sam Weller says to Mr. Pickwick, "Don't you know what a sawbones is, sir? … I thought everybody know'd as a sawbones was a surgeon." An evocative term that calls to mind the saws that 19th-century surgeons used to perform amputations, sawbones quickly became an established member of the English language, employed by such authors as H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Mercifully, medical technology has improved dramatically since then (the surgical saws used in procedures today are a far cry from the primitive tools of yesteryear), but the word sawbones is still used, often in a humorous context. Examples of SAWBONES "After abandoning his destitute family in 1913, Brinkley bought a medical degree from a ['diploma mill']( in St. Louis. An itinerant preacher assured him that he did not have to be a bona fide sawbones to cure the ills of the world." — [Bartee Haile, The Courier (Montgomery County, Texas), 19 Jan. 2018]( "Anyway, his relatives … reminded him that it's hard to shine shoes without a heartbeat. So he went back to his sawbones to talk about the pacemaker." — [Phil Luciano, The Journal Star (Peoria, Illinois), 28 Oct. 2017]( Name That Synonym Unscramble the letters to create a synonym of sawbones meaning "surgeon": AROTOEPR. [VIEW THE ANSWER [>]]( MORE WORD FUN: [WORD GAMES [>]]( [TRENDING NOW [>]]( [WORDS AT PLAY [>]]( FOLLOW US: [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( [Instagram]( SHARE: [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [View this email in a web browser]( You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day. [Unsubscribe from Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day]( [Manage your subscription settings]( Merriam-Webster, Inc. 47 Federal Street, P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA, 01102, USA [www.merriam-webster.com]( | [Privacy Policy]( © 2019 by Merriam-Webster, Inc.